January 2012
5 posts
5 tags
Share your Two Cents
We always love a fresh perspective. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with developments and add your two cents to the conversation.
Ben Lyon, VP of Business Development (@bmlyon) — www.kopokopo.com
What do you see?
I took this picture in Mombasa in 2011 — it’s one of my favorites. In it, there’s a juxtaposition between old and new, yesterday and tomorrow.
What do you see? What does this picture tell you about the shop owner, her community and her aspirations?
Ben Lyon, VP of Business Development (@bmlyon)
Empathy
We founded Kopo Kopo to help small and medium businesses prosper. But what does that mean? What is a small business owner trying to accomplish on a day-to-day basis? What tools are available to her and how does she emotionally respond to those tools?
These are the questions we asked on Wednesday during a design workshop led by Gabriel White of Small Surfaces.
Fundamentally, Kopo Kopo is a...
Disrupting Banking (Part II)
Our last post discussed how the banking industry is at the cusp of an inflection point. To recap, several US startups are attempting to redefine the customer experience by going branchless and embracing simplicity. Across the Atlantic, a new era of banking is already in full swing and — as with mobile money in general — Kenya is leading the way.
Thanks to mobile money systems like...
Disrupting Banking (Part I)
The last time I stepped into a physical bank branch was August 2010 — a Bank of America in Washington, D.C. I haven’t needed — or wanted — to visit a branch since then.
Like any consumer, I value my time. I want to deposit and withdraw funds, send money, pay bills, and get paid as quickly and conveniently as possible. That entails getting paid via direct deposit, using...
December 2011
1 post
Democratizing Card Acceptance
Accepting payment cards used to be a huge hurdle for small merchants. Thanks to Square, a disruptive startup in the US, card acceptance is now both accessible and affordable for even the smallest merchants.
Square offers a magnetic stripe reader that plugs into the earphone jack of a smart phone (see demo here). It enables merchants to accept American Express, Discover, MasterCard, and Visa...
November 2011
1 post
M-Pesa usage in Uganda
We noticed a funny thing while visiting Uganda this week: there are M-Pesa agents. Lots of them.
We noticed the first two M-Pesa agents in front of the Kampala Coach bus stop near Owino Market. Both said M-Pesa was very popular. In fact, three people asked to use M-Pesa while we were speaking with Patrick (the man pictured above).
It makes sense for there to be M-Pesa agents near the...
September 2011
2 posts
6 tags
Out with the old, in with the new
Post offices are natural agents for mobile banking and money services. Given the explosion of mobile money since 2009, should post offices compete with or co-opt mobile money services (e.g. Safaricom M-Pesa, Airtel Money, etc)?
Airtel Money and PostaPay signs in the Posta Kenya office at Yaya Centre
Tell us what you think by answering our Facebook poll or commenting on this post.
RELATED:...
August 2011
2 posts
7 tags
Formal Services. Informal Payments.
It’s hard to get a corporate mobile money account in Kenya. Even if you have the requisite documents (certificate of incorporation, letter from the board, copies of National IDs, etc), it can still take months to get everything set up.
As a result of the above, many small business owners accept mobile money payments to an individual mobile wallet. Virtually every taxi driver in Nairobi,...
WatchJohn Karanja, CEO of Whive, describes PesaPay as a “payment gateway that targets small and medium enterprises.” I stopped by the Whive office in m:Lab today to see how PesaPay works.
In short, PesaPay leverages an Android application to parse text messages from Safaricom M-Pesa, which it then posts to the PesaPay server in order to authenticate e-commerce payments.
Since PesaPay only...
July 2011
6 posts
9 tags
Donate to Famine Relief via M-Pesa
Our friend Josh Weinstein of Develop Economies recently blogged about the famine in East Africa (see his post here). He summarizes the crisis in two powerful sentences:
“When the UN declares a famine in a country of 3.7 million people, that means that either 1,200 children or 600 adults are dying of hunger. Every single day.”
If you live in Kenya, please consider donating to the...
MobiKash Launches in Kenya
MobiKash officially launched in Kenya today, bringing a two-year pilot and license registration process to a close. According to MobiKash CEO Duncan Otieno, MobiKash is the first “universal bank account” in Kenya. MobiKash Chairman Muthoni Kuria describes MobiKash, a USSD-based mobile commerce platform, as a “seamless, real-time, and open solution” for accessing financial...
6 tags
The End of Agent Exclusivity?
Safaricom has over 27,000 M-Pesa agents throughout Kenya. Coupled with the fact that its agents sign exclusivity agreements, Safaricom has an enormous - possibly insurmountable - advantage over its competitors.
But what happens when agents have the clout to reject exclusivity?
For example, Paynet Group and PEP Intermedius are both agents for multiple mobile money providers.
Paynet...
Why the PesaPi Hackathon is good for Safaricom and...
hack ·a·thon [hak-uh-thon] noun: an event when programmers meet to do collaborative programming – Wikipedia
The word ‘hack’ means different things to different people. To programmers, it means overcoming system limitations in order to solve a pain point. To non-programmers, ‘hack’ tends to have negative, often frightening connotations. With the PesaPi Hackathon in full...
Africa Rising Series: Universities - The Original...
While there is much talk about the growing incubator ecosystem in Silicon Valley and beyond, universities continue to play a significant role in kickstarting enterprises. Here in the Silicon Valley, Stanford has been fertile ground for startups for over 50 years (If you look hard enough at the graduation ceremonies, I swear those diplomas look more like certificates of incorporation).
The...
2011 Mobile Money Summit in Tweets
On June 27th, mobile money leaders from all over the world convened in Singapore for the 2011 GSMA Mobile Money Summit. Keynote presentations and discussion topics included:
State of the Industry
NFC Takes Center Stage
Untapped Markets and Opportunities for Mobile Money
Innovation in mPayments: What’s Hot?
Delivering Innovation in mPayments
Although the Kopo Kopo team was in Nairobi...
June 2011
5 posts
Africa Rising Series: Funding Markets Work...
Kopo Kopo is in a unique position to comment on the similarities and differences between operating a startup in Silicon Valley and the Rift Valley. I recently returned to the US to participate in the Plug and Play Startup Camp near San Francisco. At the same time, across the globe, Ben, Dennis, and Kibet will be moving into our East Africa office in a newly launched incubator space called the...
Africa Rising: No Tech Bubble Here
A scan of tech investor blogs reveals two conflicting sentiments: 1) when the bubble bursts, the industry will come to a grinding halt, and 2) valuations are skyrocketing because of what Mark Suster calls FOMO (fear of missing out). They also reveal that an abundance of capital is chasing a scarcity of good ideas, which may be one reason why companies like Color, The Melt, and The Naturally Curly...
5 tags
Safaricom M-Pesa: Room to Grow
Safaricom periodically releases a PDF of its Key Performance Statistics (latest version here), which lists the number of M-Pesa customers, M-Kesho customers, and agent outlets countrywide. As of April 2011, for instance, Safaricom lists 14,008,319 M-Pesa customers, 718,000 M-Kesho customers, and 27,998 agent outlets. Broken down, here are some figures we find interesting:
Despite launching over...
Mobile Money: Integration vs. Interoperability
As a web-based mobile payment gateway, we’re often asked if Kopo Kopo aims to provide interoperability between disparate mobile money systems. Although the short answer is “no”, the question shows that the distinction between integration and interoperability is unclear. Accordingly, we thought it would be helpful to outline our perspective here.
Integration refers to the...
Mobile Money: A Call for Standards
I just returned from the SWIFT Innotribe Mobile Payments Conference in Mumbai. Topics discussed ranged from interoperability to agency banking to payment channels, and the global nature of the conference helped participants – me especially – think about each topic in a new light. One topic in particular, the creation of mobile money standards, piqued my interest the most.
Given that mobile...
May 2011
3 posts
Will short-range mobile payments take off in...
Near Field Communication (NFC) is one of the hot topics in Silicon Valley right now. With Apple, Google, Visa and others all trying to make NFC payments mainstream in the US, we’re curious about the future of NFC and other short-range payment technologies (NSDT, RFID, etc) in Kenya.
Kenya is home to an ever-growing number of mobile payment companies, most of which rely on SMS/STK/USSD and...
Preparing for Pivot 25
The Kopo Kopo team is gearing up for Pivot 25, a competition that will bring together the top 25 mobile companies in East Africa. Pivot 25 takes place on June 14th and 15th at the Ole Sereni Hotel in Nairobi. If interested in participating, click here to register.
Looking forward to seeing you there!
Bridging the Valleys
Kopo Kopo recently took 1st place in the Web / IT Track of the 2011 Berkeley BPlan Competition. We are enormously grateful for the opportunity to compete and are humbled by the recognition. Most importantly, we see it as a validation of our belief that the Rift Valley, with Kenya at the helm, is quickly becoming the Silicon Valley of Africa.
Thanks to everyone for your support!
April 2011
2 posts
Check out our interview with Microfinance Africa →
The Obligatory Offering
A quick glimpse at the GSMA Mobile Money Deployment Tracker reveals roughly two hundred mobile money deployments globally. In countries like Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia, that translates to at least four mobile money deployments per market. At the extreme end – in Nigeria – it translates to the issuing of at least eighteen provisional mobile money licenses. The explosion of mobile money...
March 2011
5 posts
What is the future of software-as-a-service (SaaS)...
What is the future of software-as-a-service (SaaS) in East Africa? Write an answer on Quora What is the future of software-as-a-service (SaaS) in East Africa?
We're Hiring! Senior Java Developer (Nairobi) Job... →
We're Hiring! Senior Ruby on Rails Developer Job... →
Our Market Niche and Mission
As a mobile money aggregation and integration platform, we often get asked “Why don’t the parties involved simply build their own solution?”. The shortest answer is that doing everything in house is too expensive and time-consuming. When broken apart, though, the answer depends on the budgets, core competencies, needs, and long-term strategies of each player in the ecosystem. Integrating...
The Microfinance Revolution
Re-posted from the Nuru Internatonal Blog - www.nuruinternational.org
Microfinance has taken a serious beating recently. With news of massive loan defaults and even suicides continuing to pour out of India and an order by the Bangladeshi government that Muhammad Yunus step down from Grameen Bank, things are looking grim for the industry. But trouble is only one small side of the story. On the...
February 2011
4 posts
PRESS RELEASE - February 28, 2011 - Kopo Kopo... →
Kopo Kopo, a software company that operates a services platform connecting mobile money to microfinance institutions, has partnered with Hope Micro and Splash Mobile Money to bring mobile financial services to the country.
Read more at www.kopokopo.com.
Check out the new Kopo Kopo website! →
5 tags
Agent Liquidity and Microfinance
Agent liquidity is one of the most fundamental challenges mobile money providers face. In order to be effective, mobile money agents have to have a fine-tuned understanding of their market, including an ability to predict when customers will come and what types and volumes of transactions they’ll want to perform. This already difficult task is made all the more challenging when microfinance loan...
January 2011
4 posts
9 tags
AML / KYC Regulation in Practice
Anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) regulations are often front and center in mobile money conferences and publications. But what do they amount to in practice? How difficult is it for customers, and therefore electronic transactions, to slip through the cracks? No one answer addresses the various reasons for non-compliance, but failure is usually due to breakdown in or...
Mobile Money in the Back-Office
Last week we asked “Is it better for borrowers to eat the transaction costs or microfinance institutions to eat the back-office costs [of mobile money]?” and indicated that we favor the latter. Instead of explaining our own reasoning, we figure financial institutions put it best. For instance,
Kevin Kihara of Family Bank cites “attractive unit economics and meaningful corporate cost savings” as...
Who eats the costs of mobile financial services?
Mobile money is changing the way microfinance institutions do business. For the institution, mobile money is more efficient, safe, and transparent than cash. For the customer, mobile money offers “unrivaled convenience” and lowers the effective interest rate of credit by reducing time and transport costs associated with repayment. Customers still face significant transaction costs, however,...
10 tags
Starting a Social Enterprise in Kenya
Thinking about starting a social enterprise in Kenya? First, now is definitely the right time to move: Kenya is quickly becoming a global hotspot for technology innovation and there’s no shortage of market failures / opportunities. Second, Kenya is the gateway to the region: if your target is the East African Community, Nairobi is “the natural choice” for your headquarters. ...
December 2010
4 posts
Differentiating Phone Numbers in Kenya
Here’s how to differentiate which network someone in Kenya uses based on their phone number. Numbers beginning with…
020 = landline operated by Orange
070, 071, 072 = Safaricom
073 = Zain (now Airtel)
075 = yu
077 = Orange
In-network calls are cheaper than out-of-network calls, so most people use these to determine which SIM card to use when calling someone. Could be...
When Two Elephants Fight...
The saying “When two elephants fight it is the grass that gets trampled” may soon be disproved in Kenya. With two of the biggest elephants in town, Equity Bank and Safaricom, vying for financial inclusion dominance, Kenyans everywhere stand to benefit.
Safaricom M-Pesa is a mind-blowing success. In less than four years, M-Pesa has built a network of over thirteen million subscribers (51% of the...
18 tags
The Kenyan Mobile Money Ecosystem
Kenya is by far the most exciting, innovative mobile money market on earth. Below is an overview of some of the major and upcoming players.
MAJOR PLAYERS
Safaricom M-Pesa
Launched in March 2007, Safaricom M-Pesa was the first mobile money system in Kenya. It is now the most successful mobile money deployment on earth, boasting use by 51% of the adult population. In addition to...